When horror hits home

Driving south on Nova Scotia’s 101 highway, I went right by Berwick on the day Harley Lawrence died. I went by a lot of other towns, too, but in the car, the radio was full of Lawrence’s death, the fact that he’d burned to death in a Berwick bus shelter where he’d been sleeping.

Two men have pleaded guilty to second degree murder for the horrible crime of pouring gasoline over Lawrence while he slept. Lawrence was homeless, begged for change and had lived in a number of different Nova Scotia towns over the years.

He was, apparently, sliding deeper and deeper into mental illness, becoming less and less communicative. The men who lit him on fire, Kyle Fredericks and Daniel Surette, had — until now — criminal records for mainly a variety of small-time offences, although Fredericks was charged and acquitted of criminal negligence in a case where a 21-year-old died of a drug overdose.

Berwick residents have spent a lot of time asking how it had happened; plenty, no doubt, opined that things had changed forever, that Berwick had changed, that others would never look at the town the same way again.

Yes and no.

It reminds me very much of another horrible story, one I covered 18 years ago. Gary O’Brien disappeared on Nov. 9, 1996, taking his three sons — Adam, then 14, Trevor, 11, and Mitchell, 4 — with him. O’Brien had rigged his house in rural Torbay, outside St. John’s, to explode, using two 400pound propane cylinders and a suspended power drill. The engine block of his car was found in the ocean 11 months later.

The children are still listed as missing, even though there has been no sign of them. Their mother still holds out hope that they are alive, perhaps kept out of touch in a religious commune.

But in 1996, the same feeling of disbelief swept over Torbay — I was in television then, and all you had to do was get out of the van and people would come up and say, “I can’t believe that would happen here.”

The truth is, it isn’t about Berwick or Torbay: horrible things can, and do, happen anywhere.

The combinations that make them happen have far more to do with the individual makeup of those who do them than any geographic location ever will.

It can, and does, and will, happen again.

Circumstances and people will click together with horrible, almost unfathomable results, tumblers set to produce horrors that come together almost by chance.

I remember on that drive by Berwick — down to Digby and back again over a few days — hearing the disbelief and horror at Lawrence’s death grow, par- ticularly because the autopsy showed he was alive when he burned, and showed that he was burned so horribly that bones came through his flesh.

The most striking thing, though — the thing that we can do something about — is summed up in a comment on a CBC Nova Scotia story about the killers just this week.

And it actually is a way that communities can make a difference.

“How come no one cared about Harley before he died?”